cjfishessay

The Legacy of Woodstock by Bruce J. Shulman

After the Chicago debacle, many young Americans, those politically active and those not, found both protest and going along with the system equally undesirable. The prospect of a genuine counterculture, a real alternative to the corrupt, violent, greedy, tactless mainstream, exerted powerful appeal. Only a small part of the Sixties generation had succumbed to the "hippie temptation"; during the fabled 1967 Summer of Love, the best estimates placed the number of hippies at roughly 100,000 young Americans. But that small, if rather boisterous, minority blossomed, in the words of one chronicler, into a "garden of millions of flower people by the early 1970s."

During autumn 1968, a Village Voice reporter asked Country Joe McDonald, lead singer of Country Joe and the Fish, to "rap about the revolution." Country Joe's most famous song, "Feels Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag," had directly attacked the war in Vietnam ("It's one, two, three, what are we fightin' for," the song demanded). But McDonald assured the interviewer that "there isn't going to be any revolution." To carry out a revolution, he explained, "you have to control things and most of the people I know aren't ready for that. They want a leaderless society."

The Voice reporter remained dissatisfied. "What about the guerrillas?" he demanded. "I don't know any," Country Joe explained. "I know a lot of people wearing Che Guevara stuff...a bunch of tripped-out freaks." Then Barry Melton, Country Joe's guitarist, chimed in: "The revolution is just another word for working within the community." But the interviewer wasn't having it; he wanted to write about honest-to-goodness revolutionaries. "Hell," he protested, "you are the Revolution." No, concluded Country Joe, shaking his head. "I'm just living my lifestyle. That's what you should be doing."

On the surface, Country Joe's renunciation of revolution and embrace of "lifestyle" sounded apolitical — even antipolitical, as if it rejected political action altogether. Certainly, looking back to the mid-1960s, it would not have been farfetched to demarcate a firm split between the student radicals — the New Left or antiwar movement — on the one hand and the counterculture or flower children on the other. A lack of understanding divided the Berkeley radicals intent on shutting down the draft induction center in Oakland and the Haight-Ashbury hippies staging the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park. The same palpable tension separated the SDS radicals occupying the president's office at Columbia and the Yippies throwing dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. There was even something of a difference in style; mid-1960s New Lefties looked well scrubbed, with crewcuts, ties, and serious, even earnest demeanors. Certainly, they looked different from the emerging counterculture with its long hair, beads, psychedelic fashions, and experiments with mind-altering drugs.

But the lines between the two always remained murky and amorphous, and after 1968, they vanished. Young radicals, even those most straightforwardly political — in the sense of trying to stop the war or directly influence government policy — had embraced the wider cultural critique of the counterculture. And the counterculture developed an essentially political edge — a rejection of the values, beliefs, and priorities of mainstream America. At Woodstock, Country Joe introduced "Fixin' to Die" by leading the assembled mass in an obscene chant: "Give me an F, Give me a U, Give me a C, Give me a K, What's that spell!" The F-U-C-K chant, with its deliberate attempt to shock sensibilities by rejecting established, repressive standards of propriety, asked why Americans could find such language profane, but not the war in Vietnam. It suggested an alternative, more liberated, and supposedly more honest and authentic way of being. The obscene chant was as much a political protest as the antiwar song that followed; political protest and countercultural sensibilities went hand in hand.

In 1969, one SDS leader estimated that three-quarters of the organization's membership could be classified as hippies. "Now the talk has shifted to cultural revolution," pundits reflected. "Gentle grass is pushing up through the cement." Several broad forces fed into this widening of the counterculture after 1968. Frustration certainly contributed — the growing sense that straightforward, organized political protest had failed. The war dragged on, Nixon became president, GIs invaded Cambodia, and students died at Kent State. "It was not that we disagreed with the radical interpretation of America," one antiwar protester explained after he dropped out and moved to a commune in New Mexico. "It was that by the Nixon era that message was irrelevant." Young people concluded that protest had to evolve, somehow become more fundamental. If you could not convince the older generation to change its beliefs, to stop the war, you could refuse to participate.

In fact, a general alienation from mainstream America, not just disillusionment with politics, fed the counterculture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many young people grew disgusted with the nation and its basic values. This discontent filled both veterans of Sixties radicalism and millions of young Americans who had never demonstrated interest in political protest. "I learned to despise my countrymen, my government and the entire English speaking world, with its history of genocide and international conquest," one disgruntled New Leftist wrote after decamping to the Vermont woods. "I was a normal kid." "America," another young man reflected in 1969. "Listen to it. I love the sound. I love what it could mean. I hate what it is."

Polls revealed widespread disenchantment among American youth. In 1970 & 1971, one-third of America's college-age population felt that marriage had become obsolete and that having children was not very important. The number identifying religion, patriotism, and "living a clean, moral life" as "important values" plummeted. Fifty percent held no living American in high regard, and nearly half felt that America was "a sick society." In this setting, many young Americans no longer saw any reason to heed established conventions about sex, drugs, authority, clothing, living arrangements, food — the fundamental ways of living their lives.

So what could you do if you found yourself in such a supposedly sick society? Country Joe had the answer: "You take drugs, you turn up the music very loud, you dance around, you build yourself a fantasy world where everything's beautiful." Frustration and alienation pushed Americans toward the counterculture, but also exerted a strong pull of its own: the conviction that it was possible to drop out of the polluted, corrupt mainstream and live according to one's values. Young Americans believed they could do it right, without the phoniness and hierarchy, the profit and power, the processed food and three-piece suits, the evening news and the suburban ranch house. They could build alternative institutions and create alternative families — a separate, authentic, parallel universe. "We were setting up a new world," Barry Melton, the Country Joe guitarist, recalled — "a new world that was going to run parallel to the old world but have as little to do with it as possible. We just weren't going to deal with straight people."

Fed by these diverse streams, the counterculture burgeoned in the early 1970s. The senior portraits in any high school or college yearbook display its broad influence. A 1966 edition, or even 1967 or 1968, shows clean-cut faces, ties, and demure dresses; they resemble stereotyped images of the 1950s. But the 1972 or 1974 yearbook reveals shaggy hair, beads, granny glasses. Of course, no one could precisely measure the counterculture, or distinguish the dedicated freak or head from the fellow traveler or counter-consumer, who simply adopted a style without much content. As one tie-dyed anthropologist put it, "There were no hippie organizations, no membership cards, no meetings, no age limits....One did not have to drop out to 'qualify' as a hippie, or have to take drugs, participate in sex orgies, live in a commune, listen to rock, grow long hair. No minimum requirements. No have to." The movement is "not a beard," a University of Utah student explained. "It is not a weird, colorful costume, it is not marijuana. The hippie movement is a philosophy, a way of life." It implied rejection of the dominant culture and a decision to practice alternate lifestyles.

Certainly the counterculture embraced several salient features: dope, as an entry way to expanded or altered consciousness, heightened awareness, and communal experience; freer sexual mores and living arrangements; a new relationship to nature; distinctive dress and foodways; and a commitment to communal living. Freaks rejected capitalist materialism, especially the grind of workaday jobs and the emphasis on property and acquisition. They constructed alternative institutions — food co-ops, underground newspapers, free medical clinics. In most cities and university towns, hip neighborhoods emerged, with natural food restaurants, head shops, Zen bakeries, independent record stores.

The counterculture also relied on music as a means of communication, a communal ritual, a gathering of tribes. After the success of the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 (featuring the first major performances of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin), rock festivals spread around the country. They offered a potent mix of counterculture and capitalism, barefoot hippies and big-bucks event promoters. One hundred thousand people gathered for the Atlanta Pop Festival. In Seattle, helicopters dropped flowers on the assembled revelers.

But it was Woodstock that would transform the nature of the rock festival, create its mythology, raise its most extravagant hopes. Like all of the other festivals, Woodstock began as a commercial venture. Four producers offered farmer Max Yasgur $50,000 to use his farm near Bethel, New York. They hoped 50,000 rock fans would pay $18 each for three days of performances by more than twenty acts, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, John Sebastian, Sly and the Family Stone, Arlo Guthrie, Country Joe and the Fish, and Richie Havens.

Yet Woodstock became something much, much bigger. Before the first band came onstage, a massive pilgrimage of young people clogged the roads, forming the most massive traffic jam in U.S. history. They crashed the gates; eventually 400,000 people camped on the grounds, frolicking in the mud, listening to the music, cooking and eating together, even giving birth. The logistical problems were daunting: inadequate sanitation facilities, insufficient food and water, delivering medical supplies. But somehow it worked. Even the promoters, who took a financial bath, thought a new society had been born.

The real festival, organizers told one journalist, would not end with Woodstock. The concert marked "this generation and this culture's" departure from the old generation and the old culture. "You see how they function on their own — without cops, without guns, without clubs, without hassles. Everybody pulls together and everybody helps each other and it works." No matter "what happens when they go back to the city, this thing has happened and it proves that it can happen." Singer-songwriter John Sebastian agreed. Mounting the stage, he called the scene "the biggest mindfucker of all time." Sebastian had "never seen anything like this. There was Newport," he remembered, referring to the annual folk festival in Rhode Island, "but they owned it. It was something different."

Woodstock fueled ecstatic hopes that a new generation had emerged, that an alternative to the corrupt mainstream could be, was being, constructed. A few months later, another massive outdoor concert opened at Altamont, California, with the Rolling Stones as featured act. Anxious for "Woodstock West," the audience of about 300,000 remained generally peaceful, the mood celebratory. But close to the stage, the scene grew ugly; brawls and bad acid trips led to a number of ugly scenes. In a particularly ill-advised move, the Stones offered the Hell's Angels $500 worth of beer to guard the stage. As the crowd pushed closer, the Angels began beating people, busting pool cues over their heads. Eventually, four people died at Altamont including a young black man, beaten and stabbed to death by the Angels as he danced too close to the stage.

If Woodstock seemed idyllic, the birthplace of a new culture, Altamont swept into the open all the ugly features of the counterculture — "the greed, the hype, the hustle," to quote one observer. At Altamont, the Woodstock generation learned that its fondest hopes, its most ambitious objectives would not be easily met; it would have to confront the darker realities of the age.

Among those harsh truths was the concerted opposition of the establishment. The mainstream press attacked the hippies and the festivals as harbingers of dope, debauchery, and destruction. And the opposition fired more than harsh words. Vandals bombed Trans-Love Energies Commune in Detroit; others shot out the windows at the offices of the Street Journal, an underground newspaper in San Diego. When Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda made the cult classic Easy Rider (1969), they encountered violence while filming the movie in the South. They had expected the taunts: "Look at the Commies, the queers, is it a boy or a girl." But they were stunned by the stories they heard "of kids getting their heads broken with clubs or slashed with rusty razor blades." Patrons in one bar jumped the longhaired filmmakers themselves. "Don't be scared, go and try to change America," Hopper concluded, "but if you're going to wear a badge, whether it's long hair or, or black skin, learn to protect yourself."

The film itself dramatized this resistance, tracing the motorcycle journey of two drug-dealing hippies across the South. Persecuted by rednecks and hounded by police, the sojourners cannot get service at a restaurant or a room at a motel. Their brand of freedom, the alcoholic lawyer played by Jack Nicholson explains, threatens the complacency of ordinary Americans. The bikers' very existence mocks their constrained lives, dramatizing the compromises they have made and the shackles they endure.

Despite the resistance from outside and its own contradictions and difficulties, the counterculture expanded in the Seventies, spreading a less formal, more open and freewheeling way of life. But the real efforts at cultural revolution, at creating a sustainable alternative, collapsed or became diluted. Communes drifted apart; underground papers mainstreamed or failed; free clinics applied for government funding. Standing on a hill in the desert in 1971, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson recalled the feelings of imminent change he had experienced a few years earlier — "that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail." But now, "with the right kind of eyes," he could almost see "the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

The wave seemed to crest at the end of the Sixties. The Democratic party left Chicago in turmoil. The broad liberal coalition that had been its foundation, forming the bedrock of American politics for a generation, lay in ruins. The nation was divided, confused, seemingly in uproar. In the winter of 19681969, the nation turned its longing eyes toward California. There, rested and ready, if never tanned like T-shirts and bumper stickers would one day proclaim, waited Richard Milhous Nixon. On Election Day, he promised to heal a wounded people. But he had other plans.